Battle to be British

The old man's hand trembled slightly at the fingertips when he shook my hand and bowed his head in greeting. Behind his thick glasses, his eyes were clouded with worry. I tried to reassure him, and when his meagre English failed him, I was able to calm his nerves a little in Spanish. A Moroccan national, this man (I shall call him Abdellah, although that is not his real name) was about to sit what is commonly known as the English Test. This is a test at the government office in Gibraltar where citizenship and nationality issues are decided, and it is set to decide whether the applicant can speak reasonable English. It is one of the hurdles faced by non-EU immigrants to convince the Gibraltar Government that they are genuinely worthy of being citizens of Gibraltar, and thereby, of being British citizens, with all the priveleges this apparently conveys on man and soul.

The reason I was with Abdellah was not because I am a lawyer, or that I even know him particulalry well. I don't even know any Arabic beyond a basic greeting, so I was unsure how much help I would be. But all Abdellah, an old friend of my father's, wanted was a bit of company so that he would feel able to speak up at the test. In short, he was terrified.

Initially, after some telephone conversations, it seemed I would be unable to sit in the test with him. "It is not so much a test," a senior executive at the immigration office told me, "it's just a conversation to see how well this person can communicate basic information about himself, his family and his life in English, which is the language you must be able to speak to be a British Citizen."

In the end, I was unexpectedly allowed to sit in the interview with him. "I'm so nervous I can barely speak Arabic," he explained. The officers who interviewed him, I have to say, came across as very professional and spoke in quiet, but clear, simple English, and, compared to the citizenship test in the UK, this was a doddle. But somehow, what was missing, was the element of fairness. And there was an undercurrent of what I will call "unintentional racism" in the way the senior officer approached the interview. I'm genuinely not certain if this officer was aware of the effect of body language, gestures and tone of voice on the interviewee, and even the cultural differences did not appear to be taken into account - after all, it was not his fault if paperwork in Morocco is not quite the same as paperwork in Gibraltar, or Britain, or Spain, or Latvia for that matter.

Abdellah is an old man who has had a complicated life: a divorce, a second wife, some children in Morocco, some born here. But he has worked and paid tax in Gib for almost 40 years. He is a law-abiding citizen, contributing to the local community and to the local economy. There is no access to language classes in Gib to workers whose hours go beyond 12 per day in order to make ends meet - working time directives don't seem to apply in many firms here. Abdellah's English is passable. He can, when relaxed, make himself understood by his employer of 20 years, by his neighbours, his doctor, dentist, optician and others. Did he really need to prove himself in person, at his age, and talk through complex paperwork, just to be able to travel regularly to Morocco through Spain? Or vote? Or take full part in the local communities they support with their labour, with full legal rights?

After the test, Abdellah wanted to treat me to a meal and invited me and my family to stay with his family in Tangiers. I'm not sure anything I did helped, but it is clear that the process of immigration to such disadvantaged persons in Gibraltar desperately needs humanising, and then "good neighbours" like me won't need to sit in interviews, and decent citizens like him won't need to be patronised in order to prove their worth. The Battle of Britain may have been fought and won last century, but in the twenty-first century, the battle for Britishness grows fiercer.